Category Archives: Inspiriation

Things that inspire me to create

The Boys Of Fall

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning. We about 30 guests over to the studio late yesterday to watch the opening of the Griz football game on television at the studio. They were playing an upper division team from Tennessee. Needless to say we didn’t win, but it really wasn’t expected. Sometimes you just have to compete with others that are better than you to push yourself to a new level. I have not always been a football fan; in fact when I was in college I never attended a game. But when I started dating Glenn he was a huge football fanatic. Our hometown University of Montana team are known nation wide as the Grizzlies. They had been on an amazing winning streak for the past 20 years working their way to several national championships. So when I first met Glenn he said if we are going to be together you are going to have to buy season tickets to the Griz games, and we did. We have the most remarkable seats at midfield just a couple of rows above the home team. Conversely I told him we would also buy season tickets to the theatre. There is a nearby town that brings the National Tours of musical productions to our region. That year he saw Les Miserable, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Showboat, and Annie. Probably some of the best shows to be introduced into the power and spectacle of theater and I donned the apparel and entered the realm of college football. I can’t say how utterly captivated I became with going to football. At first I didn’t know much about the sport, in fact nothing. I saw them toss a coin at the beginning and then they would scramble and bash into each other, everyone yelling “get the quarter back, get the quarter back,” and I thought what a lot of fuss for twenty-five cents. No seriously it was not quite that bad but I love that story. There was something about football that rocked me to my core. There is a collective patriotism that fills a sea of people that utterly overwhelms your senses. It becomes a visceral reaction of the most primal nature as bodies collide in a test against strength and strategy. To see men, so well tuned in body, mind and spirit to put every once of their being into a team effort to come out of top as a winner. I realized my life has been this focused in mind and spirit but not body. Football for me also appeals to my core erotic psyche that is also very stimulating. Hot men in overly tight uniforms that show off all the greatest assets of their youth and manhood, out there struggling with each other. I very quickly became obsessed with the sport and fell in love with football. Eventually learning the strategy of the game. I actually bought a book on Football for dummies that I read in secret to bring myself up to speed of all the various positions, rules and plays. I remember Glenn found the book in my office and came out with a sheepish grin. I guess he knows it was love as he found my closet desire to learn more about something he was so passionate about. Football has also brought me closer to my father, because along with our seats I added another for my father. I knew he was very passionate about the sport playing in high school. Suddenly we had found a commonality and it was one of the things that broke that ice between us, opening the world of communication between us. My fascination with football has waned a bit over the past couple of years because as I have begun to put my focus elsewhere, more into my art. But there is defiantly a raw, venerable sensuality that exudes and inserts it’s way into my work and gives me a fearless strength to boldly pursue it.

“Standin’ in the huddle listenin’ to the call
Fans goin’ crazy for the boys of fall”

Kenny Chesney The Boys Of Fall

Memory Of The Senses

I am still a bit completely out of whack and trying to get myself back on track. Taking a couple of weeks away from the studio and other work seems to have just put me a bit behind in some areas and this week is mostly about getting caught back up. It still amazes me how much I manage to accomplish within the course of the day. I spend about three hours gardening in the mornings, then photography all afternoon, sometimes squeezing a little nap in before heading off to spend my five hours at UPS in the evenings. Everything seems to be part time in my life and I have been a good one for juggling all this. The gardens seem to be one of the places of my greatest joy. After seeing such extraordinary gardens in Paris, I am totally inspired with some new ideas. I really see, what an extraordinary design I have put forth in some on my own spaces. A garden is like a living sculpture that is constantly evolving and changing. Something new blooms every day. Fortunately here in Montana we actually have winters and so you really see the evolution of the entire garden process with each distinctive season. Yet it allows my winters the freedom to focus back on creative photographic projects. The gardens become my time and space to reflect on myself, dream and plan. It’s my daily breath of fresh air and becomes a renewal of my spirit.

I do not mean to come across with mostly negative intent in doing this Naked Man Project. I particularly feel quite healthy and balanced and after this past trip. I am definitely coming to a greater understanding of who I am currently and where I have been and yes there are issues that I am still dealing with. When I reflect on the past, it is that a reflection, and a sort of remembrance, as was yesterday’s post. I believe the past is the key to what makes us what we have become today and that everything we learned springs from our wealth of experience. But I think there are great lessons and insight to be gained by understanding the history of who we are. Part of my mission with this Naked Man Project was to give a true reflection of my time and history as I have lived it. To be a young man, growing up on a cattle ranch in the mountains of Montana, who turns out to be gay and creative is remarkable feat in and of it self. And yes there have been major pitfalls and obstacles to over come to get to this place where I exist currently. This is my experience! I have given myself one year to explore this identity and somehow come to some understanding of where I currently stand, but part of the fact remains that it is still a chronicle of a man becoming a product of his time, living in an era of the greatest changes of the gay movement which has been extraordinary the past 30 years in it’s evolution. And yes I see what an extraordinary part of it I have become and continue to be. It is my objective in my imagery to redefine the way we look at our selves in the sexual/sensual self. To see the body and it’s soul in a positive light. We tend to live in a world of exploitation, where the self-image is completely compromised, and so much of our culture has such an unhealthy outlook on who we are. I know this because these are the issues I have spent my own life dealing with, first hand. But we cannot ignore, nor should we forget, the history from which this all springs. I now see how the Naked Man really is the exposure of myself and the discovery of identity, and the way I have viewed this change. I will and want to delve into that past to take you there first hand.

In a sense the project become three fold. While it exposed the past, it still is a growing and learning of my own self and gaining perspective and ultimately the birth and creation of my self-expression. When I first took up photography, I was enamored by the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. In many ways I saw him as a pioneer who was able to unabashedly expose his private world for others to see. He very shockingly showed a mirror unto ourselves and to the world, what we as a culture were too afraid to examine. That time was ripe and he became the product of his time. I remember how squeamish yet enthralling it was to examine his work for the first time when I discovered his books, many years after his death. This was what brought me to taking of a camera and focusing it on my own existence. Please bear with me in the upcoming months as I explore that past and come to terms with my own history. In a sense this is like tending my gardens where the sense memory is re-ignited with a certain touch, a smell, or the color of a flower that connects me to places in my memory. These thoughts reoccur each year, at the same time, in the same place, in the same manner, and are vividly relived each time. I have been doing it for so long, it’s as if the plants and trees that surround me now contain the memory of my life.

The Shadow Of Others

I am beginning to see and recognize that I have always lived in the shadow of others. It feels most of my life has been connected to something or someone else. This past weekend I have been cleaning all of my old stuff out of the attic of the old place. Boxes and boxes of things I have collected over the years. Things I had forgotten, or better yet thing I had perhaps wanted to remain forgotten. I have been a person who has kept a petty extensive journal of my life, and so there are boxes and boxes of handwritten pages from all the days of my existence, probably the silly scrawling of a boy living in a world of misunderstood angst. The first box I began to explore seemed to contain all the images of my youth I had forgotten. I opened a pouch to discover my high school graduation pictures from Superior. The person in them was not at first recognizable, but it was unmistakably me. I stared at these images, transfixed for a long time, trying to connect to this mistakable past. In the images I was happy, content, my eyes filled with innocence and hope. Oddly enough this is not the way I remember myself. For some reason I could never see the handsomeness of a lad fill with creative zest. I have always felt it a burden to be different, odd, queer. You see I had a bother that was a year and a day younger than me. But I had somehow failed the first grade and was doomed to repeat it thus putting me at the same level as my younger brother. Mark was perfection in every way, blond hair, blue eyes, athletically inclined, the joy of my father’s life, he could do nothing wrong. He was vibrant and outgoing, everything I was not. Looking back, I become creative so as to not compete and allow myself to become original. I loved to read and often escaped through stories, I now see my creative nature was maybe also a means to escape. I was gangly, uncoordinated and often humiliated and intimidated by the other kids. You see, being one level back mentally and emotionally, I was still one level ahead in the physical development of my body and growth. And now looking back, I realized that I had lived all those years in the shadow of my brother, not thinking I was good enough to succeed only to become to oddball of our family.

I was my mother’s son, her first child, and in many ways coddled by her overprotective nature. My mother being a mousy slim hipped thing that looked like Ingrid Bergman dwelt in her own life of fear, being abandoned as a child, becoming co-dependant on every moment of her own existence. She hung on tight to those of us around her, me especially tight, that much of my youth I felt suffocated from her immense grip. I know until the day she died I was one of the most precious things to come into her existence. We learn from our parents and inherit their tendencies and I too became co-dependent on others unable to survive on my own.

Looking into this image of some thirty-two years ago, I see no trances of the reverie of my awkwardness in this image. All I see now is a beautiful boy with soft brown curly hair, a contented smile in my mouth moving up into the warmth my deep dark eyes. I really began to question, was this really me? I don’t remember being so handsome, so confident, so self-assured. Was I? How is it that the physical self can be so different from the emotional self? For some reason I always looked to my brother, and could only recognize those beautiful traits in him and could somehow never get beyond it to gaze upon myself.

Through the process of this project, my life has begun to open as I face all the things that haunt my past. Perhaps it is now time to open all those old journals and see what they will reveal. Perhaps my life is not at all the way I perceived it. I have a friend who is now asking me to look into the mirror and see all those positive things about myself that I can’t seem to or perhaps have never seen within myself before. I now think, he is right, this is the time. I realize now that most of my life has been dwelling in the shadows of others. In theater I dwelled in the darkness, behind the scenes. I have been in domineering co-dependent relationships, and now I linger in the shadows of other photographers I fantasize about emulating or becoming. I expect to succeed in a world filled with so many people wanting to do what I do, now even with their cell phones, it’s becoming hard to compete. I am beginning to see that perhaps the only thing original that I really have to offer, that is different, is myself, at this moment. This has defiantly been the year to step out of the shadows and reveal myself.

I think one of the things I fear the most is facing myself, and actually looking at what lies in front of mirror.

“End of the Relaionship” series

So “The Postcard from the Edge” fundraiser in New York seems to have been a huge hit. Another photographer named Steven Rosen selected my postcard and sent me a message. “It’s such a lovely image, but I have to say I was saddened when I found out the title. I was drawn to the shot because the two men seemed so in love. There were loads of images of beautiful men both alone and engaged in all sorts of sex acts, but your shot was the only one that seemed to have any real emotional content. Knowing that the relationship was ending casts a bit of a pall over the image for me, but it’s still very beautiful.” There was a huge response to my posting “Postcards from the Edge” so I thought I would follow it up with my journal entry from the photo shoot and another image from that series.

October 25, 2009
A great Sunday morning lying around the studio sipping coffee, listening to Dexter Gordon blow the sax, and catching up with myself through my journal.  Color begins to fill the sky though windows above my bed and create a beautiful blue glow on the textured walls surrounding me. It’s been forever since I had such a great morning. This morning I am filled with wonder, confidence, and longing. I am finally feeling peace and in touch with the space.   I am loving what I have created here. What an inspiration. Last night I had a gay couple over to work on some nude couples images. We all worked together to fixed a really great dinner of Paella, had a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir and chatted.  We took and break and work on some of the most beautiful images I think I have ever captured. The first set of images was of them in the shower entwined in each others bodies. After dinner we moved into the studio and did some extraordinary images of them lying on a bed. It stirred such a longing in my soul to watch these two extraordinarily beautiful men captivated by the other. Their bodies moving, twisted, entangled, arousing and igniting sheer sensual pleasure, writhing, rubbing, caressing, tender, passion, deeply gazing into the others eyes, responding to the others soul, colliding, giving, receiving, touching, fondling, tasting the others flesh, totally in tune and turned on by the others tenderness, excitement and pleasure. I was overwhelmed and in awe of the beauty of the love and passion exploding before me. It made me realize what an extraordinary life I have had and all the experiences I have been a part of. To photograph this was one of the highlights of my existence. I recalled these moments within myself when I was that age and consumed by such passions; and now to be this age and able to step back, connect to these desires and record these feelings once again. I was caught in a hypnotic trance of reliving my own passions igniting as if I become a part of their flesh and passions exuding before me. This was the way I approached sex!  How have I gotten so far away from it. Modern sex seems to be only about fucking. Modern pornography is only about fucking. Is this all we know or learn. Is an orgasm the ultimate goal and do we miss all the sensuality that leads up to and in between. Sex was never really about the actually climax for me, it was always about the building of pleasure, giving and receiving. I was flooded with old memories, thoughts, and impressions of my own experiences with these passions igniting from my past. I suddenly felt a stronger connection to Glenn and all that he means to me. Once they had left I called him and almost burst into tears still overwhelmed by my experience. I guess that’s what a great artist is, someone who delves, explores and then expresses all those emotions within his medium. It becomes my inward connection to how I present and express my feeling toward my subjects.